Federica Muzzarelli |
Federica Muzzarelli is Associate Professor of Photography and Visual Culture at Bologna University. She is the Coordinator of the Firts Degree Course in Fashion Culture and Technique. She is the Editor-in-chief of the scientific series “Cultures, Fashion and Society” (Pearson) and a member of the International Research Group “Culture Fashion Communication”. She is also Director of Studies of the Master in Design and Technology for Fashion Communication.
Her interests lie in the analysis and methodologies of photographic presence in contemporary visual culture. Her main scientific research focuses on photography and its relationships with contemporary art and society. Among her recent books and papers: Femmes Photographes. Emancipation et performance 1850-1940 (Hazan, Paris 2009); L'immagine del desiderio. Fotografia di moda tra arte e comunicazione (Bruno Mondadori, 2009); Moderne icone di moda. La costruzione fotografica del mio (Einaudi 2013); L’invenzione del fotografico (Einaudi 2014); From Family Album to Snapshot Style. Notes on the Aesthetics of the Snapshot Style between Art and Fashion, in “Notebooks 2015” (Pearson 2015); Lee Miller and Man Ray. Photography, Fashion, Art (Atlante 2016); The Photo Booth and the Automatic Photographic Portrait. From Criminal and Psychiatric Certification to Imaginary Escape, (Pearson 2016). |
from the margin to the centre: female agency in photography |
Women and photography, both of which were precluded from, and kept at the periphery of the artistic empire of the 19th century, become allies in a perfect conceptual – and extremely prolific – symbiosis. There’s in some women photographers, between the 19th and 20th centuries, a shared poetics, an innovative idea that connects them as women in that precise historical moment, having artistic and intellectual ambitions, who have specifically chosen photography and not painting as a vehicle of artistic expression. What women photographers and artists share is their unorthodox, or ‘alternative style’, on the one hand relating to patriarchal hegemony, and on the other hand to photography by its nature as an ultimate artistic aim of pure expression, attributed earlier only to painting. Women have instinctively come together during this specific historical period, especially in those relating to the body and to behaviour. Thus, during those same years, the ‘body’ as a semiotic symbol, slowly came to be accepted in the Western cultural domain. In a similar fashion women artists, despite numerous obstacles, were pioneers in the interpretation of the conceptual aspect of art, after centuries of having been subject to that same process of ‘exclusion’ from intellectual and artistic creativity. But this shared poetics of the rediscovery of the body and the concrete actions, was at the same time the most evident and fascinating prospect for a new climate of creativity and activity relating to performance and to identity, a climate which became a sort of preview of bodyartistic experiences of the 1960s and 1970s. Photography was useful for these pioneers not only to ‘produce art’, but as an opportunity to exhibit narcissistically a form of voyeuristic fetishism, of cross- dressing, of a search for and witness to an ambiguous sexuality, of an image-based fragmentation and reconstruction of the world, of political and ideological practices. Photography was thus an opportunity to narrate, from the margin to the centre, the body and its relationship with the world. The provocative nature of this act was precisely to be found in imagining that the cultural isolation of women, which has always been considered a condition which excluded them from many opportunities for expression, was paradoxically transformed through the use of photography into the freedom to act, allowing them to articulate the powerful potential of this means of expression. Among these pioneers there were: Clementina Hawarden, Alice Austen, Anne Brigman, Claude Cahun. |